howtosmile blog

Are your learners fascinated by mummies and pyramids? Are ancient civilizations part of your 2012-2013 curriculum? Explore ancient Egypt at Howtosmile.org with activities like Mummy Magic, The Trial: Grand Vizier Ay Stands Accused of Murder! and Modern Detectives: Think Like an Archaeologist. You can also travel to ancient Egypt this summer at three major science center exhibits across the country. 

Boston Museum of Science’s Lost Egypt: Ancient Secrets, Modern Science focuses on archaeologists' work to acquire knowledge, not just treasures. If you can't get to the museum itself, visit the virtual exhibit to play an ancient Egyptian game of Senet, send a buried message, and even plan your afterlife.

Bookworms aren’t the only bugs in the library anymore. At the new, 14,000-square-foot Children's Library Discovery Center in Queens, New York, visitors are streaming in to find a cockroach, a spider, a cricket, a shiny beetle and more. They're all part of the "Discover Bugs" hands-on science station set up in the heart of the children’s book collection. 

Discover Bugs is one of 36 touch-friendly exhibits developed by the San Francisco Exploratorium (a Howtosmile.org founding partner) in collaboration with Queens Library staff. Ten years in the planning, and funded by the National Science Foundation and private donations, the Children's Library Discovery Center is the only public library in the United States that incorporates an interactive museum.

The Howtosmile.org collection includes many activities from the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, the largest children's museum in the world. CMI Science Programmer Becky Wolfe shares her insights on how dinosaurs, books, and culture can get kids engaged in science learning.

How do hands-on activities about dinosaurs get kids so excited about science?

Dinosaurs capture kids’ imaginations. We can’t go to a zoo to see a T. rex, so kids get to imagine what T. rex looked and sounded like. Kids don’t always realize they are learning science at first when studying dinos. It’s easy to convince kids they can “do science” when learning about a favorite creature. 

Planning summer activities or camps with an Olympic theme? Howtosmile.org has lots of free and low-cost activities about and including sports and exercise, which can easily be adapted for different ages and abilities. Hold your own summer STEM Olympics with activities like Olympic Track Meet, Balance Challenge, Jump Start, Soccer Kicks, and Exercise and Memory. 

They said it couldn’t be built. Seventy-five years later, the Golden Gate Bridge has carried more than a billion cars across the San Francisco Bay. Among the 75 ideas for celebrating the GGB birthday (May 27) are “Inspire the next generation of ‘chief engineers’ by taking kids to a science museum” and “Help your kids build balsa wood bridges and hold a contest to see which bears the most weight.” 

Your school or community group could win $1500 for starting an eco-team or eco-themed project that educates kids and inspires them to take action about an environmental problem. Enter the Project Blue Planet contest, which challenges kids nationwide to involve their schools and communities in conservation.

Caring for the Earth takes on a whole new dimension when you can see the entire planet the way astronauts do. Thanks to NOAA's Science on a Sphere (SOS), you don't have to travel into space, just to one of 80 public SOS exhibits across the United States and in Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, France, St. Lucia, China, Brazil, Finland, and Singapore.

Seeming to float in space like Earth itself, Science On a Sphere creates stunning visual images from real scientific data and displays them on a six-foot-diameter globe suspended from the ceiling.

Middle schoolers may have their heads in the clouds, but that's OK—if the clouds are part of the Canopy in the Clouds/Dosel en Las Nubes web-based curriculum, created by UC Berkeley graduate student Greg Goldsmith. 

The website helps learners experience what it's like to move through Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, where Goldsmith does his doctoral research on plants. Gorgeously green, photographic panoramas can be explored in 360 degrees as well as up and down, and are sprinkled with clickable links that open videos or text about the plants and animals inhabiting this rare forest ecosystem from canopy to floor.

Master teacher Meredith Cochran is busy putting final touches on plans for this summer’s camps, for 1800 learners, at the North Carolina Museum of Life + Science. She took time to share SMILE's  impact on her work as an informal educator.

How does SMILE help your summer planning?

Our weeklong camps range over a dozen different topics across multiple age groups, and leave our team with over thirty camps to develop and implement. We end up sorting through A LOT of activities! The SMILE collection comes from such a wide variety of institutions, it helped me begin to see a bigger picture of the work we are a part of in our field. The work you are doing draws us all up into a greater standard of collaboration.

Hundreds of public gardens will hold special events for National Public Gardens Day, Friday, May 11. Activities for school groups, families and visitors of all ages will encourage people to discover their local public garden, and learn about its commitment to education, research and the environment. The American Public Gardens Association is a partner in the Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens initiative, and gardens are a great place to get kids moving with STEM.